March 23 (Bloomberg) -- The Journal of the American Medical Association is instructing people who unearth possible financial conflicts of interest in studies it has published not to go public with their complaint before editors have completed an investigation of the allegations.

The requirement, part of a new policy at JAMA for dealing with such accusations, was introduced in an editorial published online on March 20, days before the release of the next print edition. The changes follow a correction in an earlier issue that said a researcher studying Forest Laboratories Inc.’s Lexapro for preventing depression in stroke patients failed to disclose previous work for the drug company.

Investigating allegations against study authors can take months and must be thorough so as to avoid damaging a medical expert’s reputation, wrote Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA’s editor- in-chief, and Phil Fontanarosa, executive deputy editor. In the future, whistleblowers must provide a detailed, written explanation of conflicts and provide documents to support their conclusions, they said.

“Pressures to publish rapidly, reports in the news media, and comments on blogs and advocacy sites cannot overwhelm the process of thorough and fair investigation when reputations are at stake,” DeAngelis and Fontanarosa said in the editorial. “A rush to judgment may spark heat and controversy, but rarely sheds light or advances medical discourse.”

Conflict of Interest

Jonathan Leo, an associate professor of neuro-anatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, uncovered the Lexapro researcher’s financial conflict of interest. He reported it to JAMA in October 2008 after the journal confirmed that being on a speakers’ bureau of a pharmaceutical company would constitute a conflict of interest that should be declared.

Leo sent a copy of the complaint, which he e-mailed to JAMA, to a reporter at the New York Times, DeAngelis and Fontanarosa said. More than four months later, having heard no more from JAMA, Leo published a letter about the situation in the British Medical Journal.

The initial study compared Forest’s Lexapro or behavioral therapy to placebo in stroke patients to determine whether the treatments reduced the risk of depression. While both approaches proved effective, the study published in May 2008 failed to say that there was no significant difference in the extent of the risk reduction between Lexapro and therapy.

The lead author, Robert Robinson, head of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, had previously served on the speaker’s bureau of New York-based Forest Laboratories. He didn’t disclose the prior relationship with the company in the publication of the study, which was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in London at mcortez@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 23, 2009 09:22 EDT